The technology disclosed herein generally relates to flight management systems for aircraft and, more particularly, relates to techniques for generating recommendations in a flight management system.
In modern commercial aircraft, a flight crew makes flight plan entries and modifications through a flight management system (FMS) comprising one or more flight management computers (FMCs) and, typically, left and right control display units (CDUs). The FMCs and CDUs are linked by redundant data buses. These CDUs are positioned to be accessed by the pilots for purposes of flight plan data entries into the CDUs and then to the FMCs for implementation of a desired flight plan.
A flight management system installed in the flight deck of a modern aircraft performs various flight critical functions such as navigation, guidance, flight planning, datalink and performance. For the performance function, the flight management system has various internal algorithms that utilize aerodynamic and propulsion performance data stored in an aero/engine database to compute predicted flight profile and the associated trip prediction parameters such as estimated time of arrival and predicted fuel consumption quantity. However, there are certain flight phases whose trip predictions are not accurately represented by the flight management system due to different real-life scenarios.
Many airlines are using machine learning and big data analytics to better understand true aerodynamic and propulsion characteristics of airplanes and to gain additional performance efficiency, thereby decreasing operating costs. While these technologies have primarily been focused on analyzing airplane behaviors, there is also a need to better understand different operational procedures taken by flight crews due to real-time third-party influences such as air traffic control. Such outside influences can interrupt predetermined flight profiles and cannot be modeled with current FMCs. This may result in use of a procedure that is inefficient operationally.
It would be advantageous to provide a flight management system that is configured to provide guidance when a pilot confronts different real-life scenarios which are not accounted for by static pre-defined logic models and pre-computed data.